Jason Blair yesterday reacted with about as much contrition as he’s so far expressed since he was outed as a liar and a newsroom fabricator – and even said he was sorry for causing the debacle that led to yesterday’s resignation of New York Times editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd.

“I am sorry to hear that more people have fallen in this sequence of events that I had unleashed,” he said in an e-mail message. “I wish the rolling heads had stopped with mine.”

The 27-year-old plagiarist’s statements yesterday contrasted sharply with his previous scoffing. He recently told the New York Observer that he “fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism,” by falsifying quotes, plagiarizing other newspapers and pretending to be reporting from cities he never visited.

He even said he “couldn’t stop laughing” at some of his high jinks when they were recounted in the massive, 14,000-word Times report on his misdeeds.

In an interview with WCBS Channel 2 News, he expressed remorse for his lying.

“I’m truly sorry for my actions and what they’ve done. I was in a cycle of self-destruction, and I never intended for it to hurt anyone else and the pain that it’s caused my colleges, great and wonderful journalists at the Times, I’m sorry.”

However, he then spoke of his ‘demons’ – an apparent allusion to his drug abuse, which landed him in rehab recently. Blair, who is black, also said race is obscuring the issue of what he’s done, even though he reportedly makes racism at the Times the theme of a book proposal he is shopping around.